Simplicity Rules

Elliot has something to say about “Real SEO” (search engine optimization). His advice is similar to what I said about doing good stuff, only he approaches it from Google’s standpoint:

“Google’s main goal is to get people using their search engine, and the best way to do that is to get the best content at the top of the results. So regardless of what numbers their algorithms use, we still know what their algorithms do. Find good content and put it at the top.”

You could take another step back there and get at what this is really about: the user. Live by the page paradigm, do good stuff, and the traffic / search rankings / fame / TV deal on the network of your choice will follow.

You know that one Seinfeld episode where George does the opposite and has all sorts of success? Well, I’m sure it doesn’t always work, but here are a couple business examples:

• Fred Franzia, maker of Two Buck Chuck and other “value wines:” he took an industry that gets by on mystique and high margins, and went cheap.
• Sharelle Klaus started an upscale soda company. Rather than fight out margins-in-cents with Coke and Pepsi, Klaus focused on nice restaurants and specialty grocers. She’s making non-alcoholic chic.

Got any others? Even better, how about opposites that didn’t make it?

Nick Bradbury has a neat, quick take on the history menu in browsers. For years it’s been easy to bad-mouth Microsoft and their Internet Explorer browser, but I am encouraged to see even small innovations coming out of Redmond.

Read Nick’s Rethinking Simple Things.

An ATM has a small, finite number of possible operations. At its most complicated, a machine can accept withdrawls, deposits, transfers, give balance information, and dispense stamps.

To accomplish this, ATMs have about eight buttons and a keypad.

source

Yet, to me, the experience of using an ATM is usually clunky. It’s as if the interface is too simple.

But if an ATM wasn’t so brain-dead easy to use, more users might make mistakes. In most interactions with computers, it’s not a big deal to do something wrong. On the web, you just click the back button. When it comes to our money, we want to avoid even mistakes that don’t matter.

Why aren’t we striving for that kind of clarity in all our interfaces? Probably for the same reason we don’t type using a joy stick to select letters on a virtual keyboard. Sometimes an interface is too simple.

Since it is so easy for me to grab forty bucks, it still has me admiring how much an ATM can do with so little. Do I sound split on this? I am. So, I find myself asking two questions:

1. What can the Web learn from ATMs?
2. What can ATMs learn from the Web?